Bob Cringeley makes a bold statement in a blog post responding to Apple's iCloud announcement: "Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows." He says, "The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps."

I just wish the "desktop" Linux distros would stop their colon-gazing and focus on enumerating and providing fail-safes for all the myriad things that can break just enough for geeks to not see a problem.

The Linux world's greatest strength for IT people is simultaneously it's greatest weakness for the common user. There's a such thing as having too many options. For the average person, some decisions need to be make for them & the basic rule of thumb is this: "The more technical the choice, the less the user needs to even know that the choice exists." And why's this? Well, because the user usually doesn't care about technical choices, they don't really mean much to the common user. Nine times out of ten, if the user wouldn't understand either choice, then they really don't need to be exposed to the fact that there's an option. Obviously, the opposite is true for the average computer savvy techie user & on up towards the true gurus.

For example, last I checked, Windows and MacOS don't have an analogue to "Oops. You followed our simple update GUI and now your GUI won't boot. Please log into the console and manually use dpkg and apt-get to complete your interrupted upgrade".

That's because all of the companies that didn't realize how wrong this was for users have already died out. There's a reason that Apple & Microsoft are still around today as OS providers & it isn't solely because of monopolistic practices. The same is true now as it has been since the beginning: "Normal people need to be provided solutions that work & they don't really care how or why these solutions work; they also don't usually care about the ideological differences behind each solution, it's all about the ROI value." Kernel panics == downtime == loss of money. When Windows does this, there's someone to point the finger at & they could potentially lose their job if it doesn't get fixed. This isn't always the case with Linux; there's a perpetual number of distros & there's always someone to tell you that you're free to try another one. Well, companies don't have time to rotate between the flavor of the month distro, since "DOWNTIME == LOSS OF MONEY."

I say this with the best of intentions as a geek whose mother runs Lubuntu quite happily.

We are a different breed of people. But, sometimes, we let our passions blind us from some of the obvious facts. There's the ideal way & then there's the practical way for the real world. They don't often match. At least you can see the difference & that's refreshing!